My own setting is the World of Ar Gath. It's very much influenced by the film Fire and Ice, as well as the savage worlds hinted at in Frazetta's paintings and it's got quite a bit of Howard's Almuric in there too.
It's a fairly primitive technological setting. Bronze weapons and cyclopean stone castles are the order of the day. The destroyed remnants of an earlier civilisation of technologically advanced alien overlords are scattered across the planet, which is locked into an ice age.
I'm using the Mongoose Hawkmoon RPG for it's Scientific Sorcery rules, to represent the arcane technologies of the old race.
Ar Gath
Ar Gath is a planet in a far off solar system, similar in shape, size and form to earth. Fifty thousand years ago an alien race arrived from the darkness between the stars in a fleet of great starships, fleeing powerful enemies on their own home world of Gath.
The indigenous human population watched the arrival of these flying 'cities' with a mixture of superstitious awe and terror, believing that divine beings had come amongst them.
Masters of shapeshifting, the newcomers observed the handful of human hunters with the courage to approach their vessels, before emerging cloaked in the form of tall and impossibly beautiful humans. The hunters fell to their knees in fear and reverence.
The Gathani, as the newcomers were called, named this new world 'Ar Gath', which meant 'New Gath' in their alien language. They brought the primitives forth from their cave dwellings and taught them the rudiments of civilisation. Agriculture, Construction and Trade were taught to them and within a few short centuries they had evolved from primitive savagery into a fairly advanced society, capable of erecting monolithic fortresses and citadels of cyclopean stone. From hunter gatherers, they had become farmers and herders of livestock.
Yet these alien benefactors were no cosmic philanthropists.
Since their arrival upon Ar Gath, the Gathani had been experimenting upon native fauna using scientific sorcery to mutate and clone creatures, in search of a reliable food source for their dietary requirements. These cosmic predators fed on emotion, the thoughts and feelings of sentient beings.
Yet, none of their many and varied experiments were yielding such dramatic results as that of civilising the human inhabitants of Ar Gath. The humans were breeding rapidly in their new environment and a population of thousands had swollen to millions in the space of a millenium of Gathani shepherding.
The Gathani came quickly to realise that these humans were, by far, the best option for a sustainable food source. They were capable of thoughts and emotions with a range, far beyond the sentience of any other living creature upon this planet.
They gathered the most important of the leaders of humanity and 'brainwashed' them into becoming Priests of their 'Cult of the God Kings', dupes who would carry out their nefarious schemes. Their worshippers would be named the 'Tsa Gathani', which they claimed translated as 'Friends of the Gods', but in reality meant 'Food of the Gods'.
Each and every week, hundreds of these Tsa Gathani were chosen by the Priests and entered happily into the great pyramid temples of the God Kings, never to be seen again. The Tsa Gathani bodies, their minds vacant and incapable of even basic thought or movement were rendered down to provide much needed nutrients for the vast fields of crops that sustained the population of the Empire of the God Kings. The Gathani silenced any dissent with extreme violence and by informing the masses, through their brainwashed priests, that those selected had been chosen for apotheosis and were now counted among the God Kings themselves.
Yet the Gathani were taking no chances that any uprising would occur when the humans would, inevitably, learn the truth of the situation. The humans were rebellious and warlike by their very nature and only the shepherding of the God Kings prevented conflict between the fractious clans and tribes of the Tsa Gathani. It was decided that the Tsa Gathani must be disarmed and convinced to leave their protection in the hands of the God Kings.
It was at this point, some ten thousand years after the arrival of the God Kings, that the veil was lifted fom the eyes of some few of these Tsa Gathani. There were still many dangers upon the world of Ar Gath and their God Kings, though powerful, were neither omnipotent or omnipresent. Tens of thousands refused to be disarmed and when faced with punitive measures, elected to flee to the polar regions, taking with them the gathered knowledge and skills of nearly forty generations of their forebears.
They were hunted, nearly to the point of extermination, by the God Kings. A mere handful escaping into the frozen north where they lived, forgotten about or ignored by the Gathani, for thousands of years. The Tsa Gathani who remained behind continued to slave away in blissful oblivion about the true nature of their relationship with their alien overlords.
The Gathani began to experiment with climate control and slowly, but surely, expanded their empire further and further away from the equatorial regions towards the slowly retreating icecaps, whilst relying upon their sorcerous technologies to hold back the rising oceans. It appeared that the remaining free humans of Ar Gath were ultimately doomed as their hidden polar sanctuaries slowly, but surely, melted away.
Then salvation arrived in the form of new gods who appeared in the heavens. These new arrivals, known simply to those who remember the legends of their coming as 'Uz Gathani'(Enemies of the Gathani), had pursued their hereditary foes across the cosmos and the world of Ar Gath was shattered in the cataclysm of their confrontation. The fires of the newcomers weapons scoured the lands and the rapid departures of the Temple Pyramids of the God Kings toppled cities, as they lifted into the sky to meet their age old enemies, causing the deaths of countless millions among the Tsa Gathani. Over the course of a decade the conflict raged and the world burned. Such was the devastating power unleashed that huge earthquakes shook Ar Gath, throwing up new mountain ranges and creating deep chasms along the planet's fault lines. The Gathani were finally routed by their enemies and those few who survived, departed into the vastness of space pursued by their foes, the world of Ar Gath completely forgotten in their flight.
The Sorcerous Technologies that held back the oceans failed and large parts of the world were drowned in the deluge that followed. Mega Tsunamis claimed the lives of millions more of those Tsa Gathani who had survived the horrors of the 'Gods' War'.
The Climate Control sorceries began to malfunction as well and Ar Gath found itself plunged into a new Ice Age. The entire planet was covered with sheet ice, save for the regions within several hundred miles of the planet's equatorial belt and other small areas where the sorcerous technology of the Gathani remained operative.
